Practicalities

Thank you Henrik for your nice posts! It is now my time to contribute to our blog.

I thought I'd walk you through some of the things we have been planning for the last 5 months. The original plan for this trip was spawned around Christmas in 2007, with the main motivator being the trip done by BBC's TV show Top Gear. In this show (season 10, episode 1), the main presenters took upon themselves the challenge of finding "the best driving road in Europe", and unanimously decided on giving the title to Stelvio Pass located in Italy (close to the Swiss border). The road is famous for its hairpins and nice scenery, which lead to us choosing this as our theme for out roadtrip.




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Our initial purpose of the trip was to do a by-the-books roadtrip, but since we knew that the ladies in the company would not be too appreciative of this, we also decided to throw in some more classical holiday locations for good measure. This would then be the oh-so-nice areas of Lago di Garda, Rapallo/Portofino (Italian riviera) and Nice/Antibes (French riviera). After all, Henrik and myself will probably be doing all of the driving, so we need to offer the ladies some value for money as well :)

I thought I'd share with you some of the resouces used in "the making of" this roadtrip.

Since we are doing this trip by first flying from Helsinki, Finland to Munich, Germany to get closer to the Alps, our first task was to tackle the air tickets. We chose Lufthansa for the flights since they operate a direct connection between the two cities, and because of their reasonably priced fares. For finnish citizens, and excellent tool for finding the cheapeast airfares is http://www.vertaa.fi/.

Our second major task was finding a rental car. Now, since Henrik and myself are avid car enthusiasts, the generic Toyota Corolla I-couldn't-care-less-what-I-drive type of car would not suffice. After having compared all the major rental agencies such as Hertz, Avis, Europcar, Budget, Alamo and so on looking for nice cars, we had shortlisted an Audi A4 Avant class car from Avis for 470€ (for 7 days) and a Merc S350 from Hertz (570€). These alternatives were flawed from the beginning because of various problems and nuisances. For example, Avis charges a lot for a CDW (collision damage waiver), and since we "plan to fail" instead of "fail to plan" we opt to have a nice little document saving us from a whole lot of trouble if something should happen to the car. The other major problem was that we were painfully aware of the fact that the A4 has a ridculously small backseat, and that the S350 has a trunk that won't fit luggage for four persons comfortably (mind you, we have ladies joining us). Luckily, at this point I remembered another rental agency I had used the last time I visited Munich (I rented a Smart ForTwo, incredibly fun but ridiculous car), namely Sixt. This is no small player on the rental agency market, and is widely used throughout Germany. From their homepage, we found their Holiday car concept, allowing us to rent a car with additional drivers free of charge, absolutely no financial risk (complete CDW) and furthermore at a very affordable price! The car class we decided upon is PWAR, in this case the Audi A6 Avant is the reference vehicle for the class. We are also hoping on getting an upgrade to a BMW 530D Touring, if all goes well (I got them to send me the Sixt Gold membership card hoping that this would help us with this aspect, drop me a message if you need to know how to do this). In any case, we are going for a diesel powered car in order to save some €€. Hey, at least we are requiring a 3 liter engine :) Of course, at this point everything is just wishful thinking, AFAIK they can give us something we wouldn't even touch with a stick, but this being Germany, I think we can rely on getting a premium car made by "ze Germans".'


For hotel booking, we have mainly used http://www.booking.com/, a superb site for exactly this purpose. They even allow you to search for hotels in the vicinity of a given location by defining the outward radius/distance to use. We decided to book our hotels in advance to avoid having to spend the last two hours of every day finding a good and affordable hotel, at the expense of sacrificing flexibility.

For the rest of the practicalities, we have stocked up on a lot of different electrical and sofware gadgets. Henrik and myself bring one laptop each, one TomTom and one Garmin navigator (in addition to the one that is supposed to be in the car), Microsoft AutoRoute 2006 installed on both laptops with a detailed itenerary for the entire trip (this software proved to be invaluable when planning daily trip lenghts and schedules). Of course, we also need a 12V cigarette lighter splitter to power all these devices, as well as a 150W inverter to charge the computers in-car. Speaking of maps btw, Google maps has proven to be a superb tool for planning local routes (where Autoroute gets too tedious), checking out nice places to go and generally getting a good perception of the areas to be visited.

Of course no trip can be done without the appropriate photographical equipment. In addition to Henrik's camera, I'm bringing a Nikon D80 with a 18-200mm "multipurpouse" lens, and a newly acquired Canon FS100 video camera that records directly to SD cards. Since in-car photography will be a hot topic, I am currently building a windshield mount for the camera based on a "one-size-fits-all" 10€ mobile phone holder with a suction cup fastening system. This way, the movie will hopefully be less jerky, since keeping the camera from swaying when the driver is practing drifting in the hairpins is doomed to fail.

This has been a long post, however planning this trip has been a quite tedious process with a lot of twists and turns, but in general it has been a fun and rewarding journey. With a week to go, I'm looking forward to this trip more then ever, and we will continue to post here as the H-hour approaches. Hopefully we will be able to blog during the trip itself as well, almost all hotels have advertised having Internet connectivity. All we have to do now is hope that this doesn't mean a 2400 baud modem connection.

We hope that other people planning to do a similar trip will find some advice from this blog, and in case some things are left unclear or you have some additional questions, feel free to contact us!

My next post will contain a more detailed itenerary for the trip.